Google Groups to Discourse?

[Jason von Nieda]

Hi all,

I've been considering moving from Google Groups to Discourse for the OpenPnP forum / mailing list. I've set up a test instance at https://discourse.openpnp.org/ and invite you all to have a look.

Discourse is an open source messaging system that has traits of forums, mailing lists and Q/A sites like Stackoverflow. It has a much more modern interface than Google Groups and has a superset of the features of Groups. It has great support for things like categories, pinned posts, community moderation, image and video upload, etc.

So, please give https://discourse.openpnp.org/ a look. Make some posts, try out some features, etc. Feel free to create test posts and such. We can always clean it up later if we decide to use it. And once you've given it a try, please come back to this thread and let me know if you think it would be a good switch from Google Groups.

Note that if we make this switch I will lock the Google Groups group, but all the content will remain there for reference. And we will still have the Discord server ( https://discord.gg/EmsrFVx ) for real time chat.

Thanks,

Jason

[Arthur Wolf]

Google Groups will show up in my email inbox every time a new topic is created.

I've checked the Discourse preferences, and it looks like instead at best it's going to be sending daily digests (pretty much it's more a forum than a mailing list).

Is there any way I'm missing in preferences, or that you can do on your side, to make it more like what we have now with the mailing list? Or am I missing something?

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[Jason von Nieda]

Hi Arthur,

I think you can be notified of all new posts by setting Categories you want to watch:

Thanks,

Jason

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/openpnp/CAMHZkm5Ym3FUupfg2FBwiT2bMx5S%3DU2v9XC15wKMF2grBtym%2BA%40mail.gmail.com.

[Arthur Wolf]

That works for me, thanks!

It's not going to happen by default for new users though, right?

I would expect that is going to mean less engagement from users compared to the mailing list (lots of users won't actually set things up this way, and many new topics will pass by them, without them realizing).

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/openpnp/CA%2BQw0jyLEX2UpD57jPTAXCf2TPZKSbiTLAdPwFy%3DMMNHVzuTrg%40mail.gmail.com.

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[Jason von Nieda]

Looks like I can set it as a default for new users:

Jason

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/openpnp/CAMHZkm7EzmX7jcEr1b8yj8rKY8ez1Sey77Sbxz-cEOJLrdNGhg%40mail.gmail.com.

[Arthur Wolf]

Sounds perfect! Smoothie has a lot of different community "places", we tried to have as many as possible and let the users choose what they like most (and people seem to have very diverse tastes, most of them get used), and small things/settings like this, we found, can have pretty massive impact on whether people participate/are kept up to date with the project or not. All in all I definitely think Discourse is an upgrade, glad to see the change happening.

When Smoothie gave up its own forum system to instead become a category in the "Maker forums" (https://forum.makerforums.info/), they were super nice, and gathered all "historical" forum posts, and re-injected them back into their forums as if they had been posted there in the first place. I wonder if there's some way you could do this here for Mailing list -> Discourse. Potentially I can take a look at helping with writing a script, if there's no out-of-the-box solution for it. It's definitely an advantage in terms of providing helpful search results.

[Maker forums doesn't have a PNP/OpenPNP category, maybe talk to them about that? It's additional/free exposure for the project]

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/openpnp/CA%2BQw0jzBsboKgGyHwBfcF40Jbib_v%3DW90x27bXr70tKYTuOZZw%40mail.gmail.com.

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[bert shivaan]

Interesting the reply has to be at least 20 characters.

Signed up and will give opinion later.

In general I like the email approach, but I understand all the concerns too.

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/openpnp/CAMHZkm7qS3gRAOWFHWBwYiTMLNKV6GEmMtJjjcvD9PnTepFMrg%40mail.gmail.com.

[Jason von Nieda]

Just found "Mailing List Mode", which I have now enabled for the site. It's not on by default, so users can choose to turn it on. If you turn on Mailing List Mode you will get an email for every post, just like on Google Groups:

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/openpnp/CA%2BKNHNzVKVX2REsC5aSwJY3Ns-WSPrrQjGf2yHvFBMZf51s-cA%40mail.gmail.com.

[Arthur Wolf]

Thanks, that's really neat.

If users need to enable it themselves, do you think many will know it's there/a possibility? And if not, isn't there a risk this be a regression compared to the previous (Google Groups) setup?

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/openpnp/CA%2BQw0jzV-Ts8SgYQV5aLL3NqJN20UqeVQBL5_keEaxq4nAhijg%40mail.gmail.com.

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[Jason von Nieda]

I'm not seeing a way to enable it by default, although I did find a post saying it was possible. I'll keep digging.

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/openpnp/CAMHZkm5tV%2BCkqFFheKd-y9hqrWJ9UvVPfc4C_%2Bjjb0ES6zWoGA%40mail.gmail.com.

[Arthur Wolf]

If you don't find a solution tell me, and I'll look into the Discourse code, I've already had to put my nose in there, so I have some familiarity with the structure.

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/openpnp/CA%2BQw0jwMkYz%2BYXPDMP2MrN5E09DwfOAsKkw6C4OHFk5LHYeJcQ%40mail.gmail.com.

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[Richard Sim]

From this post, it sounds like the default-to-mailing-list-mode may be hidden and you need to search for it? https://meta.discourse.org/t/tutorial-for-using-discourse-over-email/111308/4

Our hackspace transitioned from a mailing list to a Discourse forum a long time ago (almost 7 years!) and I was initially very against it because of the whole "if it isn't in my inbox I'll forget about it for extended periods", which has on occasion turned out to be true. But looking at my stats, it hasn't been nearly as bad for me personally as I initially feared. However, I definitely know that's the exception, and the vast majority of our ~200 members very rarely check the forum which makes it very hard to make important communications. If people hate receiving emails they'll be motivated to disable the setting, whereas on the other end they'll just slip away from the community through no deliberate choice of their own. TLDR; I'll echo Arthur that enabling Mailing List Mode by default for all users is important.

One downside I will mention is the need for moderation on Discouse, both because it's more complicated (e.g. moving things between categories to keep it organized), and because user expectations are different on a forum (e.g. users know that a forum can be changed by mods, but a mailing list is already in people's inboxes).

I've signed up for the new forum and am looking forward to simpler navigation than email threads!

-Richard

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/openpnp/CAMHZkm6swHbMtUgmqwFHrWP4M45tuNwEWDyCVk6cXvtoM3%2BoqQ%40mail.gmail.com.

[Jason von Nieda]

Yea, I don't seem to have that option for some reason. I'll reach out to their support.

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/openpnp/CAEP8J%3DPkz6rvyJ0%3D2QMP6cC5id3JLWtm597Bc2Rzi1Q%2B_C2F8Q%40mail.gmail.com.

[Jason von Nieda]

Got a response from their support. Sort of a bummer, but it makes sense.

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Hi Jason,

I’m sorry but we do not allow the default email mailing list mode setting to be enabled on our hosted sites. The reason for this is that we have found in the past that when that setting is enabled many users end up getting sent emails from the site that they are not interested in receiving. If any of these users mark the emails they are receiving as spam, it hurts the email reputation of the site. These spam reports can impact the mail delivery for all users on the site. For this reason, it is much safer to have users who would like to receive emails for all posts on the site enable mailing list on their own from their preferences page.

Note that users can also choose to watch specific categories on the site from the Categories section of their preferences page. In many ways, this is a better option than enabling mailing list mode. It means that users will only be sent emails for categories that they are interested in.

Simon

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So, given that, I'll probably just set default categories, which is nearly as good. And in the welcome message I'll point out the "Mailing List Mode" setting so people can enable it if they like.

Jason

[Niclas Hedhman]

Boomer Question[1]; Will "Reply-To" a mail message bring it back to the right spot??

Niclas

[1] I don't want to be negative to "progress", but having been through N generations of collaboration tools, only mailing lists seem to persist indefinitely, where N is [BBS/FidoNet, News, Mailing list, XMPP, Web Forums, Myriad of Proprietary solutions]. Now it is Discord, Telegram, or Zoom and in 5 years something else. Moving around means sacrificing consistent history, but not always that important.

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/openpnp/CA%2BQw0jwgF_Nd4bxMRXyNV9RtkwfBXnmJt%3DE0wvD41jcM2_oj4w%40mail.gmail.com.

[Jason von Nieda]

I tested this, and yes reply all does work fine. It even threads it in to the right place depending on who you responded to.

See https://discourse.openpnp.org/t/notification-test/18/13?u=jason

Jason

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/openpnp/CADmm%2BKe14u1T0sPr1vbntvAq6gQ9z%3DmycLSadMvD-uUJmuF-RA%40mail.gmail.com.

[betzt...@gmail.com]

I like the new venue! 

Peter.

[Clemens Koller]

Hi, Jason!

Did you have a look at GNU Mailman 3?
It is kind of a de-facto standard in OSS.

Clemens

On 02/04/2021 16.53, Jason von Nieda wrote:
> Hi all,
>

> I've been considering moving from Google Groups to Discourse for the OpenPnP forum / mailing list. I've set up a test instance at https://discourse.openpnp.org/ <https://discourse.openpnp.org/> and invite you all to have a look.

>
> Discourse is an open source messaging system that has traits of forums, mailing lists and Q/A sites like Stackoverflow. It has a much more modern interface than Google Groups and has a superset of the features of Groups. It has great support for things like categories, pinned posts, community moderation, image and video upload, etc.
>

> So, please give https://discourse.openpnp.org/ <https://discourse.openpnp.org/> a look. Make some posts, try out some features, etc. Feel free to create test posts and such. We can always clean it up later if we decide to use it. And once you've given it a try, please come back to this thread and let me know if you think it would be a good switch from Google Groups.
>
> Note that if we make this switch I will lock the Google Groups group, but all the content will remain there for reference. And we will still have the Discord server ( https://discord.gg/EmsrFVx <https://discord.gg/EmsrFVx> ) for real time chat.
>
> Thanks,
> Jason
>

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